Six Feet Under
by LittleFairy78
Summary: Digging up graves is part of a hunter's daily life. Being buried in one - not so much. Especially since Dean doesn't fit the main prerequisite of burial: he's not dead. Not yet. But if Sam doesn't find him soon, that could change quickly.
1. Chapter 1

Answer to my own challenge over at DeanDamage (dot) com. Because I really, really wanted to read this story, so I just wrote it myself.

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters and settings are property of their rightful owners. No copyright infringement is intended and no money is being made with this story.

Rated for some bad words because, well, they're Winchesters ;-)

Enjoy!

**Six Feet Under**

**Chapter 1**

The room was dark, but something had woken him. Pounding. Music? It could be a drumbeat, but not knowing where he was, Dean could not say for sure. He was about to turn around tell Sam to turn the frigging radio off when he noticed that something was wrong.

He couldn't turn around.

Not really. Something was confining his movements, and his heart started to beat faster in his chest.

Something was really wrong here.

Frantically, Dean blinked against the darkness, but it helped nothing. It didn't make a difference whether his eyes were open or closed, the darkness around him was absolute. His heart started beating even faster and the drumbeat in his ears picked up speed. His head, the pounding was in his head. The pulsing of his own blood in his ears and a fierce throbbing pain in his head, that was what the pounding was. Not music.

But still he couldn't see, and he felt the panic rise up unbidden inside of him, gripping him with icy fingers. Was he blind? Had he hit his head, been hit over the head, and something had been knocked loose so that now he couldn't see?

Sam!

Where was Sam? If he was hurt, Sam always was around. Sam had to be around somewhere.

"Sam!"

His voice sounded raspy in his own ears, a harsh whisper more than the determined call that he had been aiming for. And something was wrong with the sound. It didn't carry like sound was supposed to carry, it sounded muffled and…just not right.

And where was Sam?

Sam would be here if he was hurt, he was always there when Dean was hurt. But Sam wasn't here now, and that meant something was keeping him away from his brother's side. Dean drew a deep breath and tried to force the panic back down. There could only be one reason why Sam wasn't with him, and that was that Sam himself was hurt, injured bad enough that he could not be with Dean.

Which mean Sam needed him.

He couldn't afford to panic if Sam needed him, even if the mere thought about Sam being hurt threatened to send the next spike of gut-wrenching fear through him.

Dean raised his arm, lifted his hand to reach for the light switch, but instead of reaching into the space beside his bed, his hand met resistance only a few inches above his head.

What the hell?

With both arms, Dean reached around himself, movements getting more and more frantic. Wherever he reached, there were only a couple of inches of space, then his hands met resistance. Soft, padded resistance.

He was locked in. Locked into some kind of padded box, barely bigger than he himself was.

The pounding in his head picked up volume again as his hands reached around himself over and over again, skimming over the soft fabric and padding underneath in search of a hole, an opening, anything. But there was nothing, no opening, no way to escape.

His breathing was coming in fast, short bursts as Dean took his hands away from the strange padding surrounding him and started patting himself down. Car keys in his jacket pocket, gun in the inside pocket, nothing in his left jeans pocket…lighter in his right jeans pocket! His lighter was still there! Thank God.

His fingers felt clumsy as Dean flipped the Zippo open and thumbed the tiny wheel. The flint sparked once, twice, then the lighter caught and the flame spread a soft yellow glow into the darkness.

He wasn't blind.

But for a second, Dean wished he was. Because as the information of what he saw traveled from his eyes to his brain and was processed there, the panic he had forced down just a few moments before broke back out in full force, a heart-stopping, breath-catching, all-encompassing wave of panic that froze all rational thought.

A casket!

He was lying in a casket!

Dean had seen enough caskets in his life to immediately know it for what it was, but he had never actually been _inside_ of one. Especially not with the lid closed. The flickering light from the Zippo illuminated the white satin that was lining the lid and sides of the casket, basking it in an eerie orange glow.

Dean didn't know for how long he lay there and stared, his brain empty except for the word _casket_.

_Casket, casket, casket._

He was lying in a casket.

It could have been minutes during which he wasn't able to move, didn't know if he was even breathing, but it felt like hours. But then another thought took over, urgent and primal and overwhelming everything else.

He needed to get out of here.

_Now._

Dean was reluctant to flip the lighter shut, to extinguish his only source of light and throw his surroundings into darkness again, but he needed both hands to find a way out of here. The sudden darkness seemed oppressing and absolute, but Dean swallowed hard and breathed against the gut-wrenching panic inside of him as he put both his hands against the lid of the casket and pushed. He pushed with all his might, muscles straining from the effort, a groan escaping his lips, but the lid didn't move an inch.

That meant either it was screwed shut or…or he was screwed. Dean swallowed and pushed again. It couldn't be. Couldn't be true. Not possible.

He wasn't buried.

He couldn't be buried.

No way.

But no matter how much he pushed, kicked and tried to lever his body against the lid, it didn't even move the fragment of an inch. Yeah, six feet of packed earth right above the casket lid would do that. Six feet of packed earth between him and the real world, between him and an unlimited amount of precious oxygen.

Breathing hard, Dean fell back onto the padded bottom of the casket. His heart was racing a mile a minute, he was sucking air into his lungs desperately, his head was pounding fiercely and when he ran a hand over his hair and face, it came away sticky. Dean didn't need to light the lighter again to see that there was blood clinging to his hand.

Because seeing the casket made him remember all too clearly how he had ended up in here. That bastard had hit him over the head with a shovel, and while Dean had been unconscious, he must have buried him in the casket he had just recently dug up.

Just his frigging luck.

It had been a crappy hunt right from the beginning. Your ordinary Kentucky town, with ordinary Kentucky townspeople. And then some of those ordinary people suddenly started dying strangely. The Winchester kind of strangely. There was no connection between the victims, and nothing that clearly told them what was going on. Could be a spirit, might be a demon, some sort of creature – hell, for all the sense it had made to them, it could have been anything. There had been no frigging clue. Three days of investigating had brought them not a single step closer to finding out what the hell was going on. And then the next victim had died, which had kinda put a little added pressure on their timetable.

So they had made the first mistake.

He and Sam had split up.

Which was a nice way of saying that Sam had stormed off to the library after they had been fighting about what to do next. Frustration about the case, the death of that sixteen year old girl that shouldn't have died if they had only figured out how to do their job a little earlier, being cooped up with each other for too long, it all simply had become too much. So at the first little thing they had started yelling at each other, and in the end Sam had decided to go and do some research in the library – _alone_. He had been very emphatic on that part, and his parting words had been that he and Dean could talk to the victim's families again once he came back.

Which was when Dean had made the second mistake.

He had left the motel.

Honestly, he wasn't too sorry about that. He was a grown man, and Sam was in no place to tell him to stay put like a little kid. There was nothing he could do in the motel, nothing to help them finally figure out what was going on. And just for the record, he had tried to call his brother. But being the good little college student that Sam was, he had turned his cell phone off in the library.

So it totally wasn't Dean's fault.

It wasn't Dean's fault that he had suddenly remembered the dead plant in one of the victim's apartments, and that it had gotten him thinking about that zombie chick they had staked back into her casket not too long ago. It wasn't his fault that the next logical step had been to do some research on his own and then take a little detour to the town cemetery to take a look around.

And it totally wasn't his fault that he had found a suspicious looking half-dug grave during his tour over the cemetery and had decided to check it out.

The only thing that might have been his fault was that he hadn't heard the grave digger sneak up on him. At least not until it had been too late and that shovel had hit his head. Then everything had turned black, but since he was now lying in a frigging casket, it didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened.

Dean gagged a little at the thought that while he had been out cold, that…that _freak_ had finished digging up the grave, taken out the fresh corpse and had buried Dean in its place.

Suddenly, the smell of death and embalming fluid seemed overpowering in his nose and the bile started to rise up in his throat. Dean forced himself to breathe, to swallow against the urge to retch. It was easier said than done, not with the smell of death clinging to everything inside the casket, clinging to _him_, but with a lot of deep breaths through his mouth he finally got his body back under control.

He should have seen it sooner. It explained everything. Somebody here was playing around with the dead. But honestly, if the only clue to that was that the one single potted plant in one of the victim's apartment was dead, they really couldn't be blamed for not noticing straight away. Seeing a dead plant, Dean's first assumption was that somebody had forgotten to water it, not that a zombie was making house-calls.

Dean had no idea if it was the exact same thing as the zombie chick in Greenville, Illinois, but it didn't really matter. Somebody was digging up corpses and people died in strange ways. That practically screamed walking dead.

And it didn't matter right now because he was buried six feet under, without his cell phone that probably wouldn't have worked anyway, and with no frigging means to contact Sam. Clumsily, Dean reached for the lighter, the panic rising again when his fingers didn't immediately close around it, but subsiding just as quickly as fingers brushed against the cold metal. He lit the flame again and checked his watch. Half past six. He had been out for a little over an hour. Maybe an hour and a half, he didn't know exactly. With any luck, Sam would come back from the library any moment now.

And Dean's guess was that if Sam came back to the motel to find both his brother and the car gone, he was going to be pissed, not worried. He wouldn't immediately go searching for Dean, especially not without a car. Maybe he'd call, but even if Dean still had his phone, cell phone companies didn't exactly have plans that covered calls from out of the grave.

Just great.

Dean extinguished the lighter again, saving what precious lighter fluid was still inside. In the encompassing darkness, his breathing sounded extremely loud in his ears. He needed to calm down, if only to save oxygen. God, that thought sent another jolt of panic through him. How much precious air had he already used up with his panicked outbursts? How long was the air in the casket going to last him? Another hour? Two? Longer than that? How did one calculate that? Volume of the casket divided by his lung volume? He didn't know how much either was.

Dean had no idea how he could possibly estimate that. That had been the kind of question he had always skipped in math tests. Sam would probably know. Sam always knew weird shit like that. But since Sam wasn't here, Dean had to do a rough estimate on his own.

The air was already stale, but Dean had no idea whether that was because the air was running out, or because of the dead body that had been lying in the casket for the past day or two. Also, the air in the casket was getting warmer. Already, sweat was popping out on Dean's forehead, and he wished he had enough room to move around to shrug out of his jacket. It wasn't even his leather jacket, and the weather outside had been rather cold, but still Dean was sweating.

Did that mean his air was running out already?

People said that suffocation like this was slow, but that it was not the worst way to go. Well, screw people. What did people know anyway? Dean didn't want to go out like that. If he already had to go, he always imagined it in a blaze of gunfire, or while saving Sammy. Dean didn't believe that there was anything heroic to dying no matter how it happened, but still. Not like this. He didn't want to go out like this. He didn't want to go out, period. Not for a long time.

Blindly, he raised his hands again and started reaching for the satin lining of the casket. If he could only get it off, if he could lay bare the wood of the casket lid, maybe there was a way to get through that. Of course that would mean so many cubic feet of earth falling down on him, but maybe he had a chance of clawing himself out. It definitely beat lying around here, waiting to be saved. Or waiting until his air ran out.

The fabric was firm under his fingers, and no matter how much he prodded and poked, he couldn't get it to tear. And of course his knife was in his leather jacket. What the hell had he been thinking? He never left without his knife. It was one of his father's most important lessons to always have a blade on him.

Dean started patting himself down again, hoping to find something useful he had missed the first time around. Yeah Dean, where's your casket-lock-pick when you need it?

But there was nothing else than the things he had already discovered the first time around. The Zippo, his car keys, and the gun.

Just great.

Setting the satin on fire might work to get it off, but then he could as well set himself on fire while he was at it. He wasn't desperate enough to stop thinking clearly, and he definitely wasn't stupid. Not to mention that he didn't have any oxygen to spare, so setting things on fire definitely was off the to-do list.

Of course he could try to shoot a hole into the casket lid. He still had his gun, though it was a mystery why the freaky grave digger had left him that when he had taken his cell phone. Dean had a vague idea why that could be, but he stopped his thoughts from going down that road. He definitely wasn't desperate enough to contemplate that. Not yet, and not at all if he could help it.

Shooting a hole into the lid might help him get it open. The bullet would probably get stuck in the earth above him, but the hole it tore into the lid might be big enough for him to get his fingers in, maybe tear it open farther and get out. But firing his gun in a confined space was a huge risk, especially since he had no idea what kind of casket he was buried in. All it took was a hardwood casket, a slightly wrong angle, a little thing going wrong and the bullet was going to ricochet. And in a confined space like this, he could as well shoot himself in the head straight away and spare himself the trouble.

No, the gun was out of question, at least not until he knew what kind of casket he was lying in.

Which left him only his hands and the car keys as tools.

Sweat was running down his face now, rolling from the bridge of his nose into his eyes and made him blink furiously in the darkness as Dean clumsily pulled the keys to the Impala out of his jacket pocket. He took the key and rammed it into the satin lining of the lid with as much force as the confined space of the casket would allow him. The round end of the key pressed painfully into his palm, but with some satisfaction Dean felt the satin lining give way and tear as the key was pushed against it. With a shout of triumph, Dean started moving the key to and fro, trying to tear as much of the satin as possible.

When he had created a sizeable rip in the satin, Dean let the keys drop without second thought and started to use both hands to claw at the torn fabric. His eyes were screwed shut tightly against the sweat dripping in his eyes. It didn't matter anyway. It wasn't as if he could see anything in the darkness for as long as his lighter was out. But he felt the pieces of fabric and padding drop down on him as his fingers tore them loose.

Again, his breathing was accelerating, and in a distant corner of his brain he knew that he should calm down, relax his breathing and try to save as much oxygen as he could, but right now that wasn't an option. He was finally getting somewhere, for the first time since waking up in this frigging nightmare he had the feeling that he had a chance of getting out of here.

Desperately, Dean clawed at the lining, until his fingers finally met resistance, fingernails scraping over something cool and smooth that could only be the casket lid. A sob-like sound escaped Dean's throat, far beyond his ability to control it, even as his hands were still trying to lay bare more of the lid from the padding and satin covering. Not a sob-like sound of relief. There was no relief. Because he didn't need to light the Zippo again to see what it was that his fingers were touching.

It wasn't wood.

The casket wasn't made of wood.

Of course, because that would have given him a chance. Of all the caskets he could have ended up buried in, he didn't get the pine box that was easily breakable. No, he ended up in a metal casket. A frigging _tank_ of a casket, and no way for him to get out of this on his own. If he tried to shoot through the lid, the bullet was definitely going to ricochet off the metal and hit him. And no amount of clawing, banging and scratching was going to get him out of here.

Exhausted, Dean let his head sink back on the padded pillow that reeked of death and embalming fluid and wiped at his eyes which were still burning from the sweat and the hopelessness of it all.

He wasn't getting out of here on his own.

And if Sam didn't find him, he was going to suffocate.

He was screwed.

...SPNSPNSPNSPNSPNSPNSPN **TBC** SPNSPNSPNSPNSPNSPNSPN...

Thanks for reading and as always, please let me know what you think. Thanks a lot.


	2. Chapter 2

Here you go with chapter 2. We're going to stay with Dean for a little longer with this one, just because he's got the interesting perspective right now.

On a short side note, Mythbusters did some research on how long a person can survive in a closed casket before the air turns toxic. For any of you who might have seen that, I claim artistic licence on that aspect of the story. Not much of it, but some.

Enjoy!

**Chapter 2**

He didn't want to check his watch again. Checking his watch meant lighting up the Zippo. And Dean didn't know how much gas was left in the lighter. Also, fire burned precious oxygen. Dean had no idea how much oxygen a lighter flame ate up, but he had none to spare. Absolutely none. He had never before regretted it that the hands of his watch didn't glow in the dark, but now he did. It sucked.

Or maybe not so much.

Actually, he didn't want to know how much time had passed, how many more minutes of air he had breathed away. He didn't want to. But yet he wanted to, no he _needed_ to know at least that much. In this nightmare, he needed something to ground himself, even if it was something as insignificant as the time. There was nothing else for him to hold on to, after all. Nothing but a darkness so black and thick and all-penetrating and reeking of death that it would have sent shivers down Dean's spine if it hadn't been so hot and stuffy in the casket.

His hands felt numb as he picked up the lighter despite all concerns about remaining lighter fluid and oxygen and flicked the wheel. This time it took five, six, seven turns of the wheel for the flint to catch, and the flame was small and flickered strongly once it lit.

Was his oxygen already running this low? Or was it simply the Zippo that was slowly giving out?

Dean couldn't say for sure, and he really didn't want to contemplate which was worse – his time running out, or facing his last minutes, maybe – hopefully – hours in total darkness. Quickly he raised his left arm and took a look at his watch. Ten past seven. A bit more than half an hour since he had woken up. Less than two hours since that grave digger had hit him over the head with that shovel.

Dean's head was still throbbing from where the metal had hit him on the right side of the head. He had felt the huge lump behind his right ear earlier, and his hair was still sticky with blood from the wound. With that and the fact that he had passed out, it was likely that he had a concussion. Dean very nearly laughed. Yeah, on the long list of his current problems, a concussion wasn't exactly on top. It probably didn't even make the top five. His air was about to run out soon, and once it did, it wouldn't matter much anymore whether or not the blow to his head had shaken his brain loose or not.

_Now would be a good time, Sam._

It would be very much appreciated if Sam managed to get here, and sooner rather than later.

Not that Sam had any idea where to look for him, but hey. What was that freaky ESP thing of his good for if it only told him when random strangers were in danger, but gave no warning when Sam's own brother could really need a little help?

But maybe that was not how it worked. Who the hell knew how that psychic crap worked? Dean didn't, not at all. And Sam didn't really have a clue either. He just got hit by visions, out of the blue, and was in a scary amount of pain and discomfort until they passed.

Dean hated it when that happened. When he could only stand by and watch his brother suffer.

He really didn't like to see Sam go through that. But right now, he'd appreciate a vision. Didn't need to be a big one, just enough to make Sam lug his ridiculously tall frame to the cemetery and start digging.

Damn, that throbbing in his head was annoying. And it hurt. Pulsing, pounding, throbbing, making him feel sick to the stomach.

One thing he had learned today. The air in a coffin didn't last for very long. He got that it normally wasn't a requirement to have enough breathable air in a place where you put dead people, but still. Would it hurt to consider the fact that somebody might get buried alive?

He had thought it would last him a bit longer at least. Another hour. Maybe two. Enough for Sam to find him.

Because he could really need a little help now. Sam had to know that. He was all for that emo-shit, wasn't he? Shouldn't he have a brotherly premonition or anything? A spidey sense telling him that Dean could use a helping hand?

_Get your ass in__to gear, Sam. And bring a shovel._

But now already it felt as if he was sucking in anything but oxygen every time he drew breath. He only wanted to draw in as much air as he could, fill his lungs and hope to catch more oxygen that way, but he forced himself not to. He needed to keep his breathing flat and regular, make the little air he had last longer. And he knew that every time he exhaled, he made the air in the casket even worse.

Didn't that become toxic after a while?

He distinctly remembered reading something about that somewhere. Maybe. He didn't remember clearly. Maybe he hadn't read it, maybe it had been Sam telling him about it. His brother always spewed up pieces of wiseass knowledge that nobody else knew or cared about. Sam would know.

Maybe he should call Sam and ask. Yeah, he could definitely do that. Sam's face always lit up like a Christmas tree when he was asked about geek-stuff like that. It made Sam happy, and that was what Dean was there for, right? Make sure that Sam was happy. So he should just call Sammy and let him go into a geek rant. And he could tell Sammy to come and dig him out while he had him on the line.

Yeah, he should definitely do that.

Clumsy fingers patted down his pockets and sides. Where was his phone? He never left the house without his phone. He needed his phone to calls Sammy, because if he didn't call Sammy then nobody was going to dig him out, and he was never going to find out how much air fit into a coffin and how much oxygen a person needed to survive if they were buried…

He must have dropped his phone.

But where was it?

Maybe it had rolled under the bed or something. He just needed to turn on his side and reach under the bed, then he could get to his phone. Or had he put it on his nightstand?

But he couldn't really move, and he was so tired. He only wanted to sleep, but the room was so hot, and he couldn't sleep. He needed to get to his phone, call Sammy and tell him to turn down the heat.

Something about that didn't make sense.

If he could only tell what it was, but it was so hard to think straight in this stuffy air.

Why didn't anybody open a window?

Sam. Sam's bed was closer to the window, wasn't it? Was it so hard to get out of bed to let some air into the room?

Sam.

There was something important, something he couldn't forget.

Something about Sam.

He needed to call someone. Sam. Right. He needed to call Sam.

But that didn't make sense, not if Sam was in the same room. He didn't need his phone for that. He only needed to open his mouth and call out to him, and he would do that. He'd certainly do that, if he wasn't so tired and the world around him wasn't so stuffy and hot.

Had Sam left? He had gone before, that Dean remembered clearly. He had left for Stanford. For over three years he had been gone, he could never forget that. Three years without Sam. But Sam had come back, right? Dean remembered that. Sam had come back, and then he had left him again. And again.

Sam always left him. He had come back each time, right? It was all so fuzzy in Dean's head. But he was fairly sure that Sam had come back each time he had left. But then why did he leave?

Didn't he know what that did to Dean?

Especially now after Dad…

Dean couldn't do this alone.

Alone. There was something. He was alone, that's why he needed Sam. He needed Sam to come for him, wasn't that right? Damn, why was it so hard to have a single clear thought?

Sam never had that problem. Dean smiled at that thought. No, Sam's brain was so freakishly huge that he probably never stopped thinking. He was a thinking machine. Had been even as a little kid.

Dean still remembered that spelling competition when Sam had been in what? Third grade? Yeah, third grade. Their Dad hadn't been able to make it, and Sam had begged until Dean had agreed to come and watch.

He clearly remembered how embarrassed he had been. The only teenager amongst all the parents, teachers, and the kid contestants. Everybody had stared at him, and it had been embarrassing. Frigging embarrassing. Until Sam had entered the stage, and had knocked the ball out of the park. Sammy had been barely nine, but he had stood there and had spelled words that most of the parents probably hadn't known how to spell. From the moment Sammy had entered the stage, embarrassment had turned into pride, and when Sam had won the competition, it had been Dean who had clapped and cheered the loudest.

He had known it then. In hindsight, he must have known it then. Must have known that Sam had a different life ahead of him, a life in which he could use that huge brain of his for something else but hunting. Something better. He had always known that Sam's wasn't made for digging up graves for his whole life.

Digging…

There was something…

Something important about digging. What was it?

He didn't know. It was so hot in here, and that rhythmic throbbing in his head was making I hard to hear his own thoughts.

Digging. And Sam. But Sam shouldn't be digging. Sam should be at college, reading books and getting good grades and having a girlfriend and being happy. That was all he ever wanted. And Sam was going to get that happy, normal, and safe life he craved so much. Dean was going to make sure of that. He didn't know how, but he had to.

Somehow.

Sam.

Where was Sam?

Why wasn't he here?

Sam had to know that Dean always worried when he didn't know where his brother was. Always. He needed to know, needed to watch out for Sammy, needed to look after Sammy, make sure that he was safe, and happy.

It was his job, and he needed to know where Sammy was to do it. Bad things happened when he didn't look out for Sammy. Gordon. That crazy cannibal family. Meg the demon chick. No, he needed to look out for Sammy and make sure that all the bad things didn't get to him.

But he was alone.

He had no idea where he was, or what had happened, or even why it was so frigging hot in here and the air felt too stuffy to breathe, but that was one thing he was sure of. He was alone. And he was in trouble. The kind of trouble that he couldn't get himself out of alone.

Alone.

That's all it ever came back to.

Alone. The one thing he had never wanted to be. But now he was alone, and he knew that something was seriously wrong, something bad was going to happen soon and there was nothing he could do about it now. Nothing at all.

Blindly, he reached out with his hands, startled when his fingers encountered fabric and padding and metal.

And then he remembered. The casket. He was in a casket. Buried alive, and alone, and Sam probably wasn't going to find him in time because Sam was pissed at him and didn't even know that he was missing, or that he was in trouble. No, by the time Sam was going to find him it was probably going to be too late. If Sam was ever going to find him.

That thought sent a sudden burst of panic and, along with it, clarity through him. He was going to die here. Alone. Sam wasn't going to find him in time. If he was ever going to find him. How should he? There was no trace, nothing but a freshly dug grave on a cemetery, and graves on a cemetery really were nothing unusual.

Desperately, he started clawing at the torn fabric and padding with numb fingers, ready and willing to claw himself out of this prison before it killed him. But the metal under his fingers was unyielding, it didn't give way under his fingernails. Nothing. He could do nothing but grab fistful after fistful of padding and satin, tearing it off the lid to reveal even more metal underneath, until his little strength finally ran out and his hands dropped uselessly to his sides. He was gasping, panting for air, but there was nearly no air left for him to breathe no matter how hard he tried to force it into his lungs.

No air.

He was alone, and he had no air. Just the throbbing in his head that grew louder and louder with every time he tried to breathe but failed to come up with enough oxygen to keep his body awake and working. And nobody was ever going to find him.

He was alone, he had no air, and it was unbearably hot. He couldn't change it, maybe a miracle would happen if he only closed his eyes and let go. Maybe then Sammy would find him. Maybe then he wouldn't spend eternity in somebody else's grave, without anybody knowing where he was and what had happened.

There was something hard under his hand. Something…what was that? Clumsily, agonizingly slow he reached inside his jacket to find out what it was. His gun. Oh yes, the friendly grave digger who had given him a free burial had left him his gun. And Dean knew exactly why the man had done that. Not to shoot his way out of the casket, because that wouldn't work.

Oh, the gun was a way out of this. Not a way out of the casket, but a way out of this mess.

And as Dean lay there, alone in the darkness with not enough air to breathe, with just that rhythmic throbbing in his head and no hope of being found anytime soon, that way out started to look more and more attractive.

**TBC**

**TBC**

**TBC**

Thanks for reading and as always, please let me know what you think. Thanks a lot.


	3. Chapter 3

So, you were asking for Sam and where he was. Well, this chapter is all about that.

Enjoy!

**Chapter 3**

He was going to kill his brother.

It was the only option, really. There was no other way.

Sam was pacing up and down the motel room, seething with anger. How hard could it be? He knew that Dean was a stubborn idiot, but was it really that hard to just stay in the motel room for an hour or two while Sam was in the library? Sam was sure that it was payback for their earlier fight, but really. How childish was that?

An hour. Maybe an hour and a half. That was all Sam had asked of his brother. Just an hour for him to go into the library and check out a few things, hoping to find a clue to this hunt. But Dean had taken off. Sam had spent even less time in the library than estimated. All in all, he had been gone for less than an hour, giving up on his fruitless research in favor of questioning the victim's families again.

He really shouldn't have been surprised to find the Impala gone and the motel room empty upon his return. He really shouldn't have been.

But damn it, they didn't have time for this childish crap. Just because Dean was pissed at him, just because they had been yelling at each other over some insignificant thing because they were both just too frustrated with this case, it still was no reason to take off wordlessly. Dean had taken the car, his jacket and gun, but nothing else.

Chances were he had gone out for dinner without Sam, or maybe that he had holed up in a bar somewhere. One of those really mature things that Dean was prone to do.

Sam was going to kill him.

He was already about to storm out of the motel room again to check the bars and diners in the immediate neighborhood, when his eyes fell on the laptop on the table beside the door. Sam was sure that he had closed the laptop and packed it into his bag earlier on, but now it was standing in the middle of the table, open and still running, the cord of the adaptor sneaking down the table leg and into an electric socket in the wall.

Sam felt his anger rising again. He didn't mind Dean using his laptop. Not anymore, at least not really. It wasn't as if he could stop his brother, anyway. But the fact that Dean never powered it down after using, that most of the times he didn't even close the lid or unplug the power after the battery finished charging was driving him insane. It was right there with Dean's dirty clothes strewn all over the place, empty and greasy food wrappers on Sam's bed, and no hot water left in the shower whenever Sam wanted to take one.

Angrily, Sam stomped over towards the table and moved his finger towards the touchpad. The screensaver was running, which meant that Dean had been gone for more than fifteen minutes now. When Sam moved his finger across the touchpad, a single browser window opened, showing the starting page of a search engine with no word typed into the search bar. At least this time, it was no porn that froze up his computer.

Dean was far from being a computer illiterate, but he had never quite gotten the hang of erasing his browser history. Or if he had, he simply didn't bother to do so with Sam's laptop. Curiosity sparked, Sam moved the cursor over the screen and started clicking through the sites Dean had been looking at before he had left.

Definitely not porn.

On the contrary. It was research.

Dean had been doing research before he had left. He had visited the online archives of the local newspapers, and had looked at obituaries. Strangely, he hadn't been looking at the obits of the victims that had made them come here in the first place. No, Dean had been checking out recent deaths that didn't seem to have supernatural causes. Sam found the obit for Charlotte Myers, a housewife in her mid-thirties, who had died in a car crash and had been buried two days ago. Sam looked at the picture of the smiling brunette woman for a second before he clicked on the next obituary. Another woman, Francine Berger, an elderly woman who had died of pneumonia. No picture in that obit. Had Dean discovered a pattern there, something that Sam missed? Why hadn't he called then? Sam's cell phone had been turned on nearly the entire time, he had only switched it off for twenty minutes or so while he had been in the reading room of the library.

Quickly, Sam checked the next links in Dean's browsing history. As the first page loaded, he sucked in a breath. Raising the dead, unholy ground – Dean had been looking into ways to bring back the dead. But why? Sam's mind was racing as he went through the deaths they were investigating. They hadn't considered it, but it could be…they needed to check if any gravesites had been disturbed lately, if there was any connection between the victims and the owners of those graves. It could fit, he guessed, but still…it didn't make sense.

They had been to the cemetery early in the investigation, visiting the victim's graves and searching for clues. There had been no sign of unholy ground. So even if they were dealing with the living dead, it was different than it had been back in Greenville, Illinois. But it could be…There was a ton of different lore on how to bring back the dead.

But what had Dean discovered that had made him take off like that? Had he stumbled across a clue, one that told him he couldn't wait for his brother's return? Or had he simply gone to check something out? There were no more browser links to follow. Sam had gone through all of Dean's research, now he needed to draw his own conclusions about it.

What would Dean have done? Talked to the families of those two women? He definitely would have waited for Sam for that. Dean didn't like dealing with emotionally distraught people, and he most certainly didn't react well to people who were deeply submerged in grief. It made him feel uncomfortable, and whenever possible he let Sam take the lead during those conversations.

So where else could he have gone?

Unholy ground…

It was possible that he had checked out the cemetery again, looking for anything unusual at the gravesites of those two women who had died recently. Because if you wanted to raise the dead, you did it while they were still fresh. A walking corpse was bad enough, a walking corpse that was smelly was not something you raised without a good reason.

Sam still didn't understand what exactly was going on, but he was going to check out the cemetery. And since Dean had taken the car, he was going to get there by cab. Dean was definitely going to pay him the money for that back once Sam found him, down to the last penny.

And then Sam was going to kill him.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

The Impala was standing there, mockingly reflecting the sunlight as Sam got out of the cab and paid for the ride. Of course Dean was here. Stupid idiot.

On the way here, Sam had tried calling his brother's cell three times, but all his calls were going to voicemail after four rings. Either Dean had turned the phone on silent and didn't hear him, or he was ignoring him. Sam didn't know which possibility made him angrier, but one way or another he was going to tear Dean a new one for this stunt.

How a grown man could behave so childish was beyond Sam. It wasn't as if they had come to blows earlier. Just a little argument that had gotten out of hand because they both needed to vent off some steam. Some yelling and unfounded accusations. Definitely not reason enough to get stupid and go off on his own.

Sam pulled his jacket tighter around himself against the early evening chills and jogged through the cemetery gates. The place wasn't huge, but big enough so that not the entire area was immediately visible as he entered the cemetery. There was nobody around whom Sam could have asked for the location of the gravesites of the women Dean had been checking out, so he simply started off into one direction. The place wasn't too big, sooner or later he was going to see his brother.

As he walked, Sam pulled out his cell phone again and hit the speed dial for his brother's number. Again, the phone rang four times and went to voicemail, but Sam didn't bother to leave a message. What he had to say was a message that needed to be delivered in person.

He found the first grave by accident. There was a fresh grave to his left that made Sam look, and his eyes fell onto the grave marker for Francine Berger. The elderly woman who had died of pneumonia a few days ago. Sam stopped and took a closer look at the grave.

It didn't look disturbed, but it was difficult to say that with a grave that had been dug only two days ago. One thing was sure, and that was that there was no sign of unholy ground anywhere on or around Francine Berger's grave. The grass around it was undisturbed, there were flowers blooming on the graves beside it, and the earth looked moist and fertile. Dean was nowhere in sight either, so maybe he had checked out the grave of the second woman.

As Sam rounded a corner, he saw a van standing on a service way just a few yards ahead. It was a van of the cemetery, probably one used to drive flowers and soil around the graveyard when it was needed. That meant somebody had to be around who could tell him where he second woman's grave was.

Sam jogged up to the van, and as he approached he once more pressed the speed dial for his brother's phone. It rang once, twice…Sam stopped.

He heard Dean's phone ring. Not the ringing of his phone in his ear, he actually heard Dean's phone ring! Sam stopped and looked around, but at that moment, the phone went to voicemail once more. Sam quickly hung up and dialed again. Immediately, the tinny rock-music beats picked up again. And they were coming from inside the van…

Sam snapped the phone shut and pulled his gun out of the inside pocket of his jacket. There was no reason for Dean to be in that van. No reason other than that he had gotten himself into trouble. Slowly, Sam stepped around the van and stretched out his hand for the handle of the back door.

"Hey! What are you doing there?"

Sam spun around, hiding the gun behind his leg. A middle-aged man in work clothes was hurrying towards him from a row of graves to the right. His work pants were dirty and streaked with earth, and for some reason Sam felt something clench in his gut at that sight.

"This van is property of the cemetery! You have no business fooling around with it!"

The man was nearly upon him now, and Sam decided to play it low for now, even though everything inside of him screamed that this was trouble, that this man meant trouble, that Dean needed him to do something.

"I'm looking for someone, and I was hoping you might have seen him."

"Well, he ain't in my van, that's for sure. This is a cemetery and not a bar, there's nobody here at that hour."

With his free hand, Sam flipped open his phone in his pocket and dialed Dean's number again. A second later, the phone inside the van started ringing again, and the cemetery worker flinched and spun around at the sound. Sam snapped the phone shut and tightened his grip on his gun.

"Then why is his cell phone in your van, can you tell me that?"

Something flickered in the guy's eyes, and it gave Sam just the fragment of a second of warning that he needed to know what was coming. With a roar, the guy charged at him, and Sam quickly dodged to the side, using the man's momentum to slam him against the rear door of the van and pushing the gun against his neck in one movement.

"Where is my brother?"

The guy only laughed, a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard, and Sam took a step back to open the door of the van with his free hand. The smell of moist earth, embalming fluid and death hit Sam immediately, and he tightened his grip on the man's neck as he struggled not to gag. There was a dirty shovel lying in the back of the van, which was otherwise empty. Well, empty except for the body bag that was taking up half the loading space. There weren't supposed to be any body bags on cemeteries. Bodies here always came in caskets or urns, and the sight of the black plastic bulging around a definitely human shape sent Sam's stomach plummeting down to his knees.

Dean's cell phone was in the back of this van.

In that body bag probably.

Where was Dean?

Sam brutally shoved the grave digger into the back of the van, hearing the oomph of pain as his knee hit the shovel with some satisfaction. He climbed in after the man, the gun in his hand unerringly pointed at him even though he felt as if he was shaking all over.

"What did you do to my brother?"

A smile spread over the guy's face, showing yellow teeth and cracked lips.

"He just got what was coming to him."

Another round of free fall dropping for Sam's stomach. No. That couldn't be.

He roughly shoved the pistol against the soft flesh of the man's jaw. "Where is he?"

Dean did low and lethal. Mostly, he was radiating the danger he posed more than he verbally expressed it. He didn't need to. But Sam was loud and tall and menacing when he got angry, making himself even taller than he was and increasing the volume of his speech to underline it in case the message didn't get across.

Normally it worked.

But the grave digger only laughed in his face.

And at that moment Sam knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this man was not going to tell him where Dean was, and what had happened to him. If Dean wasn't lying in that body bag beside them, then Sam had to find his brother on his own. And he could only hope and pray that Dean wasn't lying in that body bag.

"Where is Dean?"

He had to try one more time, right in the guy's face, his voice so loud that it was hurting his own ears. But again there was no answer but another flash of teeth as the man grinned, and Sam's vision turned red. He didn't even see it as his hand moved, but he felt the gratifying impact as the butt of his gun collided with the man's temple, knocking him unconscious.

There was a roll of duct tape in the back of the van, and with far too practiced moves Sam had the man restrained and gagged in less than a minute. It didn't even take conscious thought, and that should be scary, but in fact it wasn't even something Sam thought about. The guy couldn't get away, so he restrained him. Sam hadn't exactly held himself back while pistol-whipping, so the guy was going to be unconscious for a while longer, anyway.

Which left the body bag. Sam's throat closed up as he turned around and looked at it. The shape inside was bulky, and there was no way to determine if it was Dean in there or not. And even if he was in there, it didn't have to mean that Dean was…he could be unconscious. The guy could simply have knocked him out. And sitting here on his ass contemplating the possibilities wasn't going to help Sam, and especially it wasn't going to help Dean.

Sam drew a deep breath and put his gun down on the floor of the van. His hands had been steady when he aimed the gun at the grave digger, but as he reached for the zipper of the body bag now, Sam realized that both his hands were shaking visibly. It couldn't be Dean.

The sound of the zipper was grating through the silence as Sam determinedly pulled it down and opened the body bag. The smell of decay and formaldehyde hit him like a wave, and Sam quickly turned his head and pressed a hand against his mouth as he gagged. He hadn't even looked properly, but a small glimpse had been enough.

Not Dean.

_Not Dean, notDeannotDeannotDeannotDean_

For some endless seconds, that was all his mind was capable of thinking. Sam drew a couple of deep breaths through his mouth, then he hesitantly turned around to take a closer look at the body in the bag. It was a woman. But the first thing Sam's eyes fell on was not her but Dean's cell phone, lying on the woman's chest as if it had been haphazardly thrown into the body bag to hide the evidence. But if Dean's phone was here and Dean wasn't, then where was he?

Sam knew the woman.

As he took a closer look, Sam realized with a clenching of his gut that he knew the woman in the body bag. He had seen her face before, smiling at him from a picture in the obituary Dean had looked at before he had left the motel. What had her name been? Myers, that was it. Charlotte Myers. The woman who had died in the car crash a few days ago. And suddenly Sam knew. With a sudden clarity he knew what had happened, and where Dean was. Sam felt like throwing up as his mind went through all the possibilities. The _only_ possibility, because really, there wasn't more than one.

Charlotte Myers should be buried, in a casket somewhere on this cemetery. But she was lying in a body bag here in this van. Dean was nowhere to be found, but his cell phone was lying in the body bag along with Charlotte Myers exhumed body. The grave digger had dug up that poor woman's body, and at one point Dean had encountered the man, too.

There was only one possibility.

Sam didn't even bother to close the body bag again, he grabbed his brother's cell phone and his gun, took the shovel and jumped out of the van. By the time the back door of the car slammed shut he was already hurrying into the direction the grave digger had come from earlier. Charlotte Myers' grave had to be around here somewhere. And if Sam was right, he didn't have much time left to find it and dig it up.

Down the first row of graves, the last one on the right. A freshly dug grave with a grave marker in the name of Charlotte Myers. The grave didn't look more disturbed than the other fresh grave Sam had looked at earlier, but Sam _knew_ it had been disturbed recently. The body that was supposed to be in it was in the back of that van. And Sam's gut clenched at the mere thought that right now, his brother could be lying six feet under ground, in the darkness, with limited air and no way to get out on his own.

Sam shrugged out of his jacket, tossed it to the ground, and started digging.

It would be getting dark soon, but right now it was still light and theoretically somebody could come by any minute now and see him. But Sam didn't care. He didn't care about the rule only to dig up graves at night because if Dean was really buried down there then he didn't have time for Sam to wait until it was dark. If Dean was buried alive – and he could only have been buried _alive_, Sam was unwilling to accept any other possibility – then Sam didn't have any seconds to spare.

Earth flew past him as he shoveled and dug. The grave digger must have shoveled the grave close hurriedly, that was the only good thing about it all. The earth wasn't packed, it was loose and the shovel went in easily, but still it was going too slow. He needed to dig faster, he needed to unearth the coffin as quickly as he could.

How long did it normally take them to dig a grave? Sam knew, he knew that if he allowed his mind to dwell on that question, it was going to come up with a rough estimate of the time it took, but he didn't allow his thoughts to contemplate that any further. If he knew just how many minutes, hours maybe even it normally took them, he was setting a countdown for his brother. And Sam couldn't do that. He just couldn't. Time was working against Dean as it was, Sam wasn't going to set the timer on the clock on top of that.

Not for Dean.

Because Dean simply had to be alive, and he had to have enough air in his prison to survive until Sam dug him out. How big was the volume of a coffin? Sam didn't know, and his brain couldn't be bothered to start guessing right now. But the air wouldn't last for long, that much he knew. It would run out faster if Dean was awake, or if he panicked. Dean didn't panic, of course, he never panicked. Not Dean. But…

Sam shook his head and dug faster. His arms were aching, his back was hurting and he was panting, but he didn't notice. He rammed the shovel into the earth, loosened as much earth as he could and threw it out of the grave. Again and again. And again. He was working in a frantic rhythm, too fast, and he had no idea for how long he was going to be able to keep up that speed, but he just couldn't slow down.

This was Dean.

If their roles were reversed, if it was Sam in that coffin, he knew that Dean wouldn't slow down for just one second. No, Dean would tap into his last reserves, he would dig Sam out with his bare hands if he had to, and still manage to do so in time. And Sam owed it to Dean to do no less than that. No less than Dean would do for him. Nothing was going to stop Sam from getting Dean out of there, and the only acceptable possibility was getting him out of there alive.

There was no second best option here.

Ramming the shovel into the earth, throwing the loose soil out of the grave. Again, and again.

Sam didn't know if Dean could hear him, if there was any way that Dean could hear the rhythmic throbbing of his brother digging his way through to him, but he hoped he did. He hoped Dean could hear that Sam had found him and was coming for him.

_Hold on, Dean. Just hold on a little while longer._

The sun was sinking lower and the air was getting cooler as the wind picked up, but Sam didn't notice. Sweat was running down his face, his t-shirt was soaked and every muscle in his body was screaming from the effort, but Sam ignored all that.

Dean.

Nothing else mattered.

And if the earth stopped turning and hell opened its gates right now, Sam didn't care. He was going to get Dean out of this grave, and until he did, nothing else mattered.

Sam had lost all feeling of time and space, of everything but the feeling of the shovel going into the earth, the strain in his back as had to lift the shovel higher and higher to throw the earth out of the grave. It was messier than the way they normally dug graves, but the stakes were so much higher this time.

Just because Dean was a stubborn idiot who couldn't stay still for two hours and wait for Sam to come back. Because they had been fighting. Sam's gut clenched at the mere thought that the last time he had seen Dean, he had stormed out of the room after yelling at him. It happened from time to time, and it was nothing unusual. Stuck together, cramped in close quarters all day long if it was one of those cases, fights were bound to happen. Especially between two thick-headed and stubborn guys like them.

All those fights were unnecessary, but this one had really taken the cake. Sam couldn't even remember what had set it off. A wrong word at the wrong time, probably. I was always a wrong word at the wrong time, or some clothes left lying around in the bathroom, or Chinese takeout when one of them wanted Italian. Trivial things, things that weren't even worth fighting about. But it was always things like that which set off the fights. Then he and Dean yelled at each other, let out all the things that had accumulated over the past days and weeks, and let it clean the air. Normally they avoided each other for a while after that, until one of them mumbled something that could be taken for an apology and things went back to normal.

Just a stupid fight.

But Sam wouldn't let such a stupid fight be the last thing to happen between him and his brother. No way.

After what felt like a lifetime of digging, the shovel suddenly struck something hard. The coffin.

It was awkward moving around in the narrow grave Sam had dug, barely wider than the coffin as such was, but with his brother's life on the line Sam moved his 6'4'' with previously unknown grace as he hurried to get the last of the earth away from the coffin lid. No time for finesse, he just needed to get enough earth away so that he could lift the coffin lid.

The shovel was tossed aside carelessly, hitting the mound of earth outside the grave with a soft thud that Sam didn't even hear. He reached for the coffin lid, but suddenly found himself hesitating. His heart was beating a rapid rhythm in his chest, and he knew that it didn't come from the strain of digging alone.

He was scared.

Scared of what he would find when he opened the coffin lid now, scared that he was too late. Scared that he had never stood a chance. Terrified that he had failed Dean.

But all that had to wait, all the thoughts, the hesitations, the what ifs. Dean didn't have time for this.

Sam bent down and pulled open the coffin lid.

A wave of stale and moist warm air hit him, reeking of formaldehyde and fear and death.

The padding and satin lining of the coffin lid was torn, the fabric ripped in places and deep grooves running through the padding, down to the metal of the casket lid where fingers had clawed at it, ripped it apart until they reached the bare metal underneath. The breath caught in Sam's throat as he imagined what his brother had gone through, the hope he must have felt when he started tearing at the padding, the hopelessness when his fingers had touched the cold metal and he must have known that he wasn't going to get out of this on his own.

Sam swallowed and tried to force the panic down as he looked down into the casket.

Dean wasn't moving.

Sam was never going to forget that image. For as long as he lived the picture of his brother lying motionlessly in a casket, eyes closed and _not moving_, was going to haunt his nightmares.

He was lying there, pale and covered in sweat, with pieces of padding and fabric all over him and…God, his gun. His gun was in his hand and there was blood on the side of his head and Dean wasn't moving…Sam's vision blurred and he didn't even realize that he was shaking his head in denial. Dean would have waited for him, he would have known that Sam was going to search for him and find him. Dean would have never…

Not Dean.

Sam had no idea how he got Dean out of the grave. The next thing he was consciously aware of was that he was bending over Dean's prone form on the ground beside the grave. He shouldn't have been able to lift Dean out of the grave, not with his brother unmoving and limp and the walls of the freshly dug grave as high as they were, not after the strain of digging up the grave in what must have been record time. Sam had no recollection of lifting Dean out of the grave, or from where he had taken the strength to do so. Mothers were able to lift entire cars if their children were trapped underneath. There was nothing in this world that Sam wouldn't be able to do if it was for Dean.

And he knew that Dean hadn't given up the hope that Sam would find him in time. The gun had fallen from his brother's lax fingers, and the wound on Dean's head wasn't…there wasn't enough blood…

…it wasn't a bullet wound.

Of course it wasn't. Because Dean would never. He simply wouldn't.

"Dean!"

Carefully, Sam reached out and pressed his palm against Dean's cheek. The skin underneath his hand was clammy, and there was no reaction to either Sam's words or his touch.

"Dean, come on man. Say something."

But Dean didn't react. He didn't blink, and he didn't answer.

And Sam's heart stopped and dropped to a place somewhere around his knees as he realized that his brother's chest wasn't moving.

Dean wasn't breathing.

**TBC**

**TBC**

**TBC**

Thanks for reading. As always, please let me know what you think. Thanks a lot.


	4. Chapter 4

I just cannot leave you hanging too long with that cliffhanger, no matter how much I want to. So here is the next chapter. It isn't the last chapter, there is still one more to come.

Enjoy!

**Chapter 4**

Gun.

He had a gun. And for some reason it was important, he knew that.

Gun.

Sammy. He had to wait for Sammy.

That was important, too. Sammy was always important. Nothing more important than Sammy. Wait for Sammy. But it was so hard to think, and the air was so stuffy. He couldn't breathe, he only sucked in air without any oxygen. And that should probably worry him. Only it didn't.

Because he was alone, and nobody was going to find him. His time was up, and he simply couldn't hold on for any longer. His heart was beating heavily, throbbing and pounding in his ears with nearly every beat, and finally the last will to fight left him.

He couldn't even bring up enough energy to lift the gun and put an end to all this. Wasn't necessary anymore, anyway. In the all-encompassing darkness of his small prison, he didn't even notice as his eyes rolled back in his head and he stopped struggling.

It wasn't that bad.

It was only dying, after all.

And once you stopped struggling, it really wasn't that bad.

A bit uncomfortable maybe, because everything suddenly seemed to be shaking and moving, and he felt pushed and shoved around. He had heard before that the road to hell was paved with good intentions, but he had never before thought that it was so crowded that you'd be pushed around.

And it was colder than he had thought it would be. The cold was biting into his sweaty skin, was seeping bone-deep into him from below and started to freeze him from the outside.

_Dean…_

Sorry Sammy. Tried to wait for you, but I couldn't. Sorry. But you'll get over it. Go back to school, be happy, all that stuff you always wanted more than hunting ghosts.

Boy, it was cold. Shouldn't it be warm after death? Or at least not cold? But it was just his luck that it would be uncomfortable.

_Breathe Dean__!_

Yeah, been there, tried it, didn't work. There's no air left. Nothing left to breathe. No oxygen.

_Breathe, damn it!_

Yelling won't work. Dad always yelled, and it never really helped anything.

Dad.

Now that was an interesting thought. He wondered if he was going to see their father again. It would nearly make all this worth it. Nearly. Not hat he had a choice anymore, but in this whole nightmare, it was a small upside to it all. Seeing Dad again, maybe even Mom…

_Don't do this!……hear me? You don't…do this. Not now…_

Sam was fading away, and the darkness was swirling all around him now, pulling him under and tearing him away.

And then there was a pressure against his chest, pushing what little air was left out of his lungs. And his body reacted automatically, sucking in air to replace that last breath that had been forced out of him even though he knew that there was no oxygen left to breathe. But instead of stale air that had been breathed far too often already, fresh and icy cold air filled his lungs, burned down his windpipe and took him completely by surprise. Breathing immediately turned into coughing, the air he had struggled for so much for so long going neither in nor out for an endless second.

And then there were hands on him, lifting him up and leaning him against something solid and warm and _real_, one hand cupping the back of his head and the other against his back, and Sam's voice was in his ear, breath gushing over his cheek in warm bursts. It was hard to make out what his brother was saying, even harder because he had no idea what had happened and how it could be possible that Sam was here. But he was. Sam was here, and it didn't so much matter what he was saying, not for as long as Dean could only hear Sam's voice. It was enough to know that Sam was here.

_Easy. Just breathe. Just breathe. I'm here. I've got you._

Just breathe. Easy. He nearly laughed. There had been nothing easy about breathing lately. Nothing at all. But Dean was leaning against Sam's chest, he could feel it moving against him in time with his brother's breaths. Simple movements. In and out. In and out. In and out. Plenty of air to breathe out here, absolutely no reason to panic. _In_ when Sam's chest moved up, _out_ when Sam's chest moved down. In and out. He could do that. In when Sam's chest moved up, out when Sam's chest moved down. In and out.

Sam's hand was rubbing gently up and down his back, in time with the movement of Sam's chest and the tentative movement of Dean's own careful breaths, and slowly Dean found himself calming down. He sagged against his brother, too exhausted and confused to think about what had happened, how he could have possibly gotten out of this one. It took up all his mental capacities to breathe, that was all he could do. For the rest he needed Sam.

After a moment Sam shifted against him, and then something warm was wrapped around his shoulders and was tucked in tightly over his arms and around his front. It was only then that he noticed he was shivering, shaking so badly against Sam that he could no longer really feel the movement of his brother's chest as he breathed. But he got it now, the rhythm he needed. In and out. Simple. Natural. He was breathing, now he needed to get warm again.

Sam was moving him again, pulling him away from the warmth of his chest and put him down on the ground. Without Sam, even the warmth of what was wrapped around his shoulders was fading, sucked away by the icy earth.

He wanted to say something, wanted to call out for his brother, but all that escaped him was a pathetic whimper. He couldn't even open his eyes, or maybe he was just too afraid that if he did, he was going to see his brother walk away from him.

There was a thud somewhere to his left, silence for a moment, then the scraping sounds that conjured up images of boots and shifting earth. And then Sam was back, a presence Dean felt beside him even before a large callused hand gently cupped the side of his face.

"All right Dean, time to get out of here. Are you hurt anywhere?"

Dean wanted to answer, but it was still so hard to simply breathe. Besides, he didn't even know how to answer that question. He didn't think he was hurt, but he couldn't say for sure. As long as Sam was here, it couldn't be that bad.

But Sam didn't take the silence for an answer, and the hand moved from his cheek to the side of his head. Slowly, methodically, Sam moved his hands over Dean's body, his movements firm and gentle at the same time as he assessed whether Dean was hiding any injuries. He seemed content with the results, because once those hands had moved down his legs Sam let go again and once more reached for his shoulders.

"Let's get you to the car, how about that?"

Dean wanted noting more than that, but he was fairly sure that he wasn't going to get up and walk on his own anytime soon. He couldn't even open his eyes.

But then he was moving, not out of his own volition, leaving the cold ground beneath his body and he realized that Sam was lifting him up. It was frigging embarrassing to be lifted up like a little child, but he couldn't even bring up enough energy to protest against it. Sam groaned with the effort, but lifted him in one halfway smooth movement, staggering a bit to get his balance. Dean's forehead settled against warm skin, bangs of hair tickling against him and he realized that his head was leaning against the crook of his brother's neck. Not a fireman's carry, which would have been the safest and least straining way for Sam to transport him.

Dean smiled against his brother's shirt. He kept telling Sam that all that emo-crap was making things unnecessarily difficult. But, and that was something he only admitted in a distant corner of his mind, it also felt good. Definitely better than dangling off his brother's shoulder as he walked. Comfortable. He was swaying slightly in time with Sam's steps, and with his face against his brother's shoulder he knew that Sam had his back.

Sam had found him, had gotten him out of that hot, stuffy casket before he had run out of air. Sam had him, and it was okay to let go now.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

Panic exploded inside of Sam as he realized that his brother wasn't breathing.

No, no, no, _nonononono_…

He wasn't too late. It simply couldn't be.

Sam stretched out a shaking hand for his brother's throat, fingers pressing against the clammy skin in search of a pulse. A sob broke free as his fingers found a heartbeat nearly immediately. Too fast and weak, but Dean's heart was still beating.

But he wasn't breathing.

Sam took his hand away from his brother's neck and put both palms against the sides of Dean's face.

"Breathe, Dean! Please!"

No detours, Sam was immediately going for the big guns. That tone of voice normally always made Dean do what Sam wanted. It was the tone of voice that was tapping into all the little brother reserves that Sam had, but this time there was no reaction. Sam should have known. Probably Dean couldn't even hear him. He slapped Dean's cheek once, then twice.

"Breathe, damn it!"

Again, no reaction, and Sam realized that it was going to take more than a few gentle slaps this time.

"Don't do this! Do you hear me, Dean? You don't get to do this. I'm not going to let you die on me. Not here, not now."

And suddenly, Sam was calm. It was a perverse feeling, that calm settling over him with his brother lying in front of him, unmoving and not breathing, but it happened. Because this was a situation Sam had learned how to deal with from a very young age on. The thought might clench his gut together with an iron fist, but at least it was something Sam could do something about. He didn't have to stand by helplessly. If it took CPR, then it was going to take CPR. Period. The panic was still there, but suddenly it no longer overpowered everything else. First aid, that was something Sam could do. He had learned how to do that from an early age on.

Pain response. A last resort to kick start Dean's breathing reflex without CPR. Sam opened his brother's jacket and flannel shirt and rubbed his knuckles down Dean's sternum, hard. It had to hurt, but the pain caused no immediate reaction. But as Sam's hand pressed down on his brother's lower ribcage, Dean suddenly exhaled weakly and immediately sucked in a deep, gulping breath.

And started coughing.

It was a pained, wheezing and gasping sound, not much better than Dean not breathing because now it sounded as if Dean was choking. Sam quickly scrambled over, pulled Dean up by his shoulders until he fell limply against him, hoping that the upright position would somehow make it easier for Dean to breathe. Sam felt helpless as Dean continued to cough and struggle for breath, unable to do anything but hold his brother's head against his shoulder with one hand and rub up and down his back with the other.

"Easy. Just breathe. Just breathe. I'm here. I've got you."

Sam doubted that Dean could hear him, but he kept up a constant stream of reassuring muttered words, hoping that they penetrated through his brother's struggle for oxygen. Sam himself breathed deeply, exaggerating beyond his own need for air as he let his chest move in and out against Dean's in the faint hope that it would help. Because beyond that, Sam had no idea what else he could do.

It took endless minutes, but finally Dean's breathing started to even out gradually. He was still leaning limply against Sam's chest, not moving beyond his heaving breaths and the violent shivers that seemed to increase with every moment.

No small wonder, Sam mused. Dean's clothes were soaked with sweat, and the wind that had picked up was cold enough to make Sam freeze, too. His jacket was lying just a few feet away, discarded before he had started his digging, and Sam disentangled himself just enough from Dean to reach out and pull it over towards them. The jacket was too thin to provide any real warmth in the long run, but for now it had to do. Sam wrapped the fabric around his brother's shoulders and tucked it tightly around him.

But they needed to get out of here, he needed to get Dean back into the motel and warmed up, and it didn't look as if Dean was going to walk under his own power anytime soon. Reluctantly, Sam lowered Dean to the ground, making sure that the jacket was still wrapped tightly around him, and got up from his position on the ground. Dean's gun was still lying in the casket, and even though Sam couldn't have cared less about the gun right now, he knew that once he was fine again Dean would want it back.

Dean actually whimpered lowly as Sam broke contact for a moment, a sound that touched something primal and urgent in Sam and spurred him into action. It wasn't a sound Dean would normally make, not under any circumstances, and if Sam had needed another sign that not all was well with his brother, that Dean needed help, then it was that. He quickly jumped into the hole he had dug and picked up his brother's gun. Shoving it into the pocket of his jacket, his eyes fell onto something else lying amidst the torn padding and lining on the bottom of the casket. Dean's Zippo, and his car keys. Sam stuffed those into his pocket as well and climbed back out of the grave. Back to Dean.

Dean didn't move as Sam fell to his knees beside him, but when Sam stretched out his hand and put it against his cheek, Dean leaned into the contact. The panic was still there, fluttering beneath the surface, but Sam had it under control now. Dean was breathing. Everything else they could deal with. For as long as Dean was breathing, Sam was willing to deal with a whole lot.

"All right Dean, time to get out of here. Are you hurt anywhere?"

No answer, but Sam hadn't really expected one. Even conscious, Dean was never a reliable source concerning questions about his own health. Sam needed to check for himself. There was no way he was going to move Dean back to the car if he didn't know where his brother was hurt.

There was a large lump on the side of Dean's head, probably from when he had been knocked unconscious earlier. Not a bullet wound like Sam had thought for one terrifying moment. The cut had stopped bleeding by now, but Sam would need to rouse Dean and check him for any signs of concussion. Else he couldn't feel anything unusual on Dean's head, and he methodically moved his hands down his brother's body. No parts sticking out at odd angles, no signs of pain as Sam moved his hands over shoulders, arms and torso. No pain from the ribs, and no obvious injuries and signs of pain as Sam checked his brother's legs.

So just the head. He should probably be thankful, it could have hit a much less hard place.

"Let's get you to the car, how about that?"

Again, he received no reaction, so Sam carefully lifted Dean up by the shoulders, put his hands under Dean's knees and around his back and lifted him up. He staggered a little under his brother's weight, trying to find his balance and not fall backwards into the grave. It would have been easier to just sling Dean over his shoulder, but Sam didn't want to add any pressure on Dean's ribs or chest. Not just a few minutes after Dean had stopped breathing.

With Dean's head nestled in the crook of his neck, Sam slowly walked away from the grave and back towards the cemetery gates. He really hated cemeteries that were closed for traffic. It made things so unnecessarily difficult.

Dean was hanging limply in his brother's arms, hovering somewhere between unconsciousness and obvious discomfort, not quite awake but not really unconscious, either. There was still a tension in Dean's body that told Sam his brother was hanging on to consciousness. Considering his concussion that was good, but all Sam could think about was the mental torment his brother must have been through over the past hour or two, and that it might be better if he was able to let go of that at least for a little while. Only until Sam had him back at the motel.

But that was Dean. He didn't know the meaning of the word _quit_, even when the danger was already over. It went against his nature to let his guard down and let somebody else shoulder the responsibility. No, Dean struggled and clawed against all reason. Until it got too much and his body shut down.

Sam was nearly at the cemetery gates when he felt Dean go entirely slack against him. Deep down Sam knew that his brother had simply surrendered to unconsciousness, finally, but he couldn't help the spike of fear that went through him as Dean went limp in his arms. It was even more urgent to get into the car as soon as possible, but Sam slowed his steps for a second and listened for the sound of his brother's breathing.

It was still there. Of course it was still there, but Sam actually needed to hear the slightly raspy breaths, feel them brush against his neck and feel the movement of Dean's chest against his own before he fell into step again and hurried over towards the cemetery gates as fast as he could.

The Impala was parked right next to the cemetery gates, just a short distance that remained once he had walked through the gates. He didn't know how he managed to get the car keys out of his pocket, open the doors and put Dean in the passenger seat, but somehow he did. Dean was still shivering, but all Sam could do was spread his jacket over Dean again and tuck it around him.

They needed to get to the motel now. As soon as Sam had taken care of his brother and was entirely convinced that Dean was going to be all right, he was going to call the police and send them to the cemetery. Between that dug up grave, the body in the back of the van and who knew what they were going to find in the guy's apartment, Sam was sure that it was enough to put that gravedigger behind bars for a long time.

It didn't matter right now.

All that mattered was Dean. Sam had found Dean in time, he had gotten him out of the casket before his air had run out completely and Dean was breathing again.

Dean was breathing.

It had been a while since Sam had been thankful for that simple fact. It was one of those things that he took for granted far too easily, but right now he felt that he should appreciate it a lot more than he normally did. Images of his brother's pale and broken body lying in a hospital bed rose up in his memory, memories of a time when Dean had needed a machine to breathe for him because his body had been too broken to do so on his own.

Compared to that, Dean had come out lucky this time. It could have ended so much worse.

Sam slid into the driver's seat and started up the engine. It wasn't far to the motel, maybe a ten minute drive. Sam was glad for that fact, because he didn't think he could stand a lengthy drive now. More important than that, he didn't think Dean could, either. Sam was driving with only one hand on the wheel, the other pressed lightly against his brother's chest. It was only partly to make sure that Dean didn't drop forward every time Sam touched the brakes. It was also to keep contact, to assure himself that Dean's chest continued to rise and fall in time with his breaths.

Dean didn't stir for the entire drive, and even as Sam pulled the car up into the slot in front of their motel room and killed the engine he didn't show any sign of awareness. Again, no way that Dean was going to make it to the motel room under his own steam. Sam hurried over to unlock and open the door, then he raced back to the car and pulled Dean out. It had to look strangely to any passer-by, Sam maneuvering Dean out of the car and carrying him over to their motel room, but Sam could have cared less about what it looked like to anybody else.

Inside, he put Dean down on the nearest bed and just listened for a moment. Still breathing. Labouredly, not as easily as he should, but Dean was breathing. Sam straightened up and ran a hand through his hair, thinking hard. Dean had no obvious injuries aside from that lump on his head. Even if he had a concussion, they had dealt with far worse injuries on their own. But Dean had been locked in a confined space with not enough oxygen, and that was something Sam had never dealt with. He knew that too little oxygen and too much carbon dioxide in the air was a bad combination. Dean should be in hospital right now, with an oxygen mask over his face and people who had an actual MD after their name to look after him.

But Sam also knew that his brother was going to have the freak-out of the century if Sam risked exposing them like that, for something they could theoretically deal with on their own.

Those were the exact moments when Sam hated their lifestyle. It wasn't normal that they had to deal with something like this on their own for fear of the police. It wasn't fair that their job not only put them in so much danger, but also made them unable to get help when they really needed it.

But cursing the unfairness of it all wasn't going to get anything done either. Sam could mope later, right now he needed to take care of his brother. And if Dean didn't regain consciousness soon, Sam was going to get him to the hospital no matter what his brother was going to have to say about it.

First things first.

Dean's clothes were still damp and clammy from sweat, and he was still shivering. He needed to get Dean dry and warmed up, and then he needed to get him to wake up. Right, easy as pie.

The best way would have been to just stick Dean into a tub with warm water, but for as long as his brother was unconscious that was no option. It had been hard enough to get him into the motel room, there was no way Sam was going to lug him to the bathroom and in and out of the tub, not while Dean couldn't help him just one bit. So he had to do it the old-fashioned way.

Manhandling an unconscious person out of his clothes wasn't as easy as the movies made you believe. Arms and legs never wanted to move the way you wanted them to. Basically, it was like trying to undress a 190 lbs rag doll. The perverse fact was that Sam had actually done it often enough to have developed a technique for it, knowing when and where to lift, pull and push.

Sam was actually a little glad for his brother's unconsciousness when the clothes were off and he started to rub Dean down with one of the large towels from the bathroom. Dean was never one to push away help when it was necessary, but if he had been conscious there would have been a lot more protesting and pushing away involved. But as it was Dean was unconscious, unable to disturb Sam in his attempts to rub his brother's skin dry after the impromptu sauna in the casket, and hopefully also to rub some warmth back into Dean's body with the coarse fabric of the towel.

Sam didn't even know why Dean would have been embarrassed about it. It was nothing Dean wouldn't have done for him. Nothing Dean hadn't done for him countless times before.

There were pieces of padding from the casket lining stuck between the fingers of Dean's right hand, and Sam just stared at them for a long moment, feeling his gut clench as he thought of the panic Dean must have felt in the darkness of the casket, unable to see anything as his fingers clawed at the lining and padding in a frantic attempt to get out. His desperation as all his fingers encountered was smooth metal.

Dean's fingernails were torn and cracked, testament to how hard he must have clawed and struggled. Sam didn't even want to imagine what it must have felt like. Had Dean known that Sam was close, had he been able to hear him digging his way through? But even if he hadn't heard, he must have known that Sam would come. Surely he must have known, despite their earlier fight. Right?

Of course he had known. Because if their roles had been reversed, Sam would have known too. All fighting aside, they were always going to save each other, and if it was the last thing they did.

And know that he had gotten Dean out of the grave and out of his sodden clothes, he needed to get him warm again.

Working clothes onto Dean's body was not much easier than getting off his other clothes had been, but after a bit of a struggle Dean was finally dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt. Aside from the lump on his head and the paleness of his skin, he looked as if he was sleeping. His breathing had evened out, too. Maybe it was wishful thinking on Sam's part, but as he strained to listen for the sounds of his brother's breaths, he thought they were coming deeper and sounded less labored.

"Dean?" Sam settled on the edge of the mattress and leaned over his brother. "Dean, come on. I need you to wake up!"

There was no reaction to his voice, but as Sam patted his brother's cheek a frown crossed Dean's features.

"Come on, sleeping time is over. Time to wake up!"

Sam had expected a groan maybe, some sort of gradual reaction and if he was lucky, a fluttering of eyelids as Dean woke up. What Sam hadn't expected was that from one moment to the next, Dean shot bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and arms flailing as if to ward off an unseen attacker. The regular if slightly labored breathing from just a moment ago turned into harsh and frantic gasps as Dean turned his head from one side to the other, looking but not really seeing anything.

"Whoa. Dean, relax."

There was no discernible reaction to Sam's words, but suddenly the paleness of Dean's face took on a greenish tinge, and Sam had about a second or two of advance warning. Not nearly enough to go get a bucket or the wastepaper basket. Barely enough time to grab Dean and help him lean over the side of the bed as his stomach lurched and he heaved. A blow to the head and the sudden change in position would do that to you. Fortunately, Dean didn't have much in his stomach to heave up, the retching more of a reaction of his body to sitting up than a real emptying of his stomach, and what little Dean retched up ended on the towel that Sam had discarded on the floor earlier.

Sam held Dean upright as he continued to retch dryly, and once the painful heaves subsided, he helped him lie back down in the bed. Dean was panting, face bathed in sweat again and his eyes screwed shut tightly.

"Dean? It's okay. You're safe now."

Slowly, ever so slowly, Dean turned his face into Sam's direction, but he didn't open his eyes.

"Sam?"  
"Yes, it's me."

Dean seemed to sag a little into the mattress at those words.

"W'a happened?"

Dean's voice was hoarse, and Sam didn't really want to think about how that had happened. Screaming, most probably. He had screamed himself hoarse in that casket, waiting for rescue he wasn't sure would come. It was a memory Dean could deal without for a little while longer. Sam had no intention of answering that question right now. Explanations could wait until later, and he seriously doubted that Dean had forgotten everything about his ordeal, anyway. More like it that he was a bit fuzzy on the details right now, and Sam was willing to take that for the gift it was.

"You got hit over that thick skull of yours again. So you know the drill. Concussion checks, every two hours."

Sam couldn't see, but he was fairly sure that Dean was rolling his eyes underneath his closed lids.

"Come on, let's get some liquids into you."

Sam reached for a bottle of water that he had put on the nightstand earlier, unscrewed it and brought it to Dean's lips as he lifted his brother's head up with his other hand. Dean frowned, but obediently swallowed a bit of the water before he sank back and closed his eyes again.

"Hey, no falling asleep yet. You know how this goes Dean, three questions then you can go back to sleep."

Dean groaned, but Sam didn't let that deter him. "Name, year and state Dean. Come on."

"Not e'en a question."

"Humor me."

Green eyes opened a crack and stared at Sam, but Sam didn't back down under the gaze. Even a half-lidded glare from Dean would have made most people look the other way, but Sam wasn't most people. He glared right back, until he got a half-lidded eye-roll as an answer.

"Name, year and state. If you don't answer, I'll have to take you to the hospital."

That had the desired effect. Without opening his eyes, Dean sighed.

"Dean Winchester. 2006. Some Kentucky backwater town."

Sam smiled and patted his brother's leg. "Atta boy. Do you want some painkillers?"

Dean carefully shook his head, just once, already drifting off again. Sam patted Dean's leg again and got up from his perch on the mattress. He needed to clean up the mess in front of the bed, and then he had to get out of his dirty and sweat soaked clothes as well. For now Dean might seem all right, but Sam had the distinct feeling that the bad part of the night was only about to start. He needed to keep an eye out on any change in his brother's condition, and he needed to keep an eye out on whether or not the panic came back. Because that was what he had seen in Dean's eyes earlier, after he had scared himself awake and before his stomach had revolted. Panic. And that was an emotion Sam didn't see very often in his brother. In fact, he would be hard pressed to say when he had last seen it, if ever.

But as he busied himself with putting away the soiled clothes and towel, he thought that there could be worse ways to spend the night. Of course he wasn't going to get much sleep, but considering that Dean was right there in the bed next to his, exhausted and banged up but _breathing_ and alive, Sam thought there could be worse things. Much, much worse things.

The rest, they could deal with. They always did.

**TBC**

**TBC**

**TBC**

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Thanks for reading and as always, please let me know what you think. Thanks a lot.


	5. Chapter 5

This is, sadly, the last chapter of this story. I'm a bit sad to see it go, it was a lot of fun to write. Thanks a lot for sticking with me through this tale, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it.

Enjoy!

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**Chapter 5**

It was dark.

Pitch black.

And warm. It was too warm in here, and the air was stale and stuffy. Too stuffy to breathe. Not enough oxygen. It was suffocating him, slowly but steadily.

He wanted to move, but there wasn't enough space. Something was restricting him, holding him in the darkness, suffocating him…

Casket.

He was in a casket!

With that sudden memory, his heart started beating fast in his chest and his breaths were coming in short gasps that didn't give his body as much oxygen as it needed.

Casket.

He was in a casket. Buried. Dug in under six feet of packed earth and nobody was going to come and rescue him. Nobody was ever going to find him. He was going to die here.

That realization set his body moving frantically against the restraints, trying to bust out of the confined space he was being held in even though he knew it was fruitless.

Metal casket. There was no way he was going to get out of this one. His brain knew that, but his body didn't care. He bucked and strained against the walls that were holding him in, trying to break them down by sheer force of will, before he had breathed up the last of his precious oxygen. There was no plan to what he was doing, no finesse, nothing. Nothing but desperation and the sheer will to survive. And he knew he wasn't going to make it, not with his breaths so rapid that his air was going to run out any second now, but that didn't mean he could stop trying and just accept…

"Dean!"

The walls were closing in around him, pushing him down, holding him down until he was dead but he couldn't just let that happen. He had to fight. It was all he had ever learned to do, so he pushed back against it, trying to rise, trying to bust himself free.

"Open your eyes. Hey! Dean! Open your eyes, damn it! You're safe, you're free, but you need to relax man."

Sam's voice. He'd know it anywhere. It was Sam's voice, and that meant Sam was here. That was good, right? Sam wouldn't let him suffocate. Sam would get all worked up and complain, he'd yell at him, punch him maybe. But never let him die. Sam would never do that. But then why couldn't he breathe?

"Dean, you have to relax!"

He wanted to, desperately so. But then something was pressed over his nose and mouth, cutting off even more of the precious little air he had. He could breathe even worse now, how was he supposed to relax? Why wasn't Sam helping him? Why was his brother watching him as he suffocated?

Frantically, he moved his head, trying to dislodge whatever it was that had closed over his nose and mouth and was cutting off his air, but something held him firmly in place.

"Dean. _Dean_, you're hyperventilating. You have to relax."

Again, Dean tried to jerk his head away form the obstruction over his face. He heard Sam's voice, but the words didn't register. Nothing penetrated through the haze in his head but the thought that he couldn't breathe.

"You have to trust me. It'll help you breathe, man. Just trust me. Please."

That he could do.

Every part of him screamed that he needed to get rid of that thing that was firmly lodged over his nose and mouth, that it was the only thing that kept him from taking a deep breath and finally getting some air, but Sam had asked him to trust him. And Dean did. If there was anybody in this world that he trusted, it was Sam. And Sam said he was going to help. Sam wouldn't let him choke.

Dean took deep gulping breaths, breathing in air that was stale and smelled and tasted slightly of cold fries. He had no idea what was happening, the only thing he was aware of was a strange sound like crumpling paper every time he drew a breath. That, and a warm pressure on the back of his neck that held him firmly in place.

"That's it. Just breathe. It'll be better in a moment, just take deep and slow breaths."

It was difficult at first, exchanging shallow panted breaths for long and deep ones. But after a few tries, Dean noticed that breathing became a little easier. His heart was still beating a mile a minute in his chest, but he was getting there, he felt it. Sam had been right. It was getting better.

As if to confirm his thoughts, Sam's voice sounded in his ear again. "That's it. Deep and slow breaths. You're doing good. Think you can open your eyes for me now?"

Dean wasn't entirely sure he could draw any of his focus away from breathing in and out, deeply and regularly. But there was that worried undertone in his brother's voice that he knew only too well, the one that said Sam was scared and not really willing to admit it. Sam had helped him breathe again, the least he could do was to do something for his brother, as well.

So he opened his eyes.

The room wasn't dark at all. Definitely not as dark as he had thought earlier. It was bright enough so that Dean had to blink a couple of times before everything started to swim into focus.

Not a casket.

He was in a motel room. A dimly lit motel room, but the lamp above the table on the far side of the room provided plenty of light for him to see with absolute clarity that he wasn't in a casket. Not anymore. He was in a motel room, it was night if he went by the lack of natural light, he was sitting up in one of the two beds in the room, and a large hand was pressing a brown paper bag over his nose and mouth.

With a frown he jerked back, and this time the hand against his face let him move away. Dean took a deep, slow breath, feeling the fresh air work its way down his windpipe and into his lungs. It burned a little, but it also was the best thing he had ever felt.

"Slow breaths, Dean. Just keep breathing like that, your head should clear up again in no time."

Dean seriously doubted that. Right now, his head was one confused mess of thoughts, impressions and memories, and he had no idea which were which. Impossible that this could ever get clear again. But he was breathing again. That at least was something. The seduction to just suck in as much air as he could was big, but Dean resisted. Hyperventilating. Sam said he had been hyperventilating. Gulping down air wasn't going to help him then. Instead he took slow, deliberate breaths, until he felt his body slowly slide back under his control again. Once breathing worked again, he could try speaking. But it was going to be a little while until he managed that.

"What happened?" He finally brought out, his voice raspy and hoarse even though he had no idea why.

The mattress shifted, the warm pressure on the back of his neck vanished, and Sam moved into his line of vision, settling down on the edge of the bed so that he was looking at him.

"You tangled yourself up in the blanket, that's what happened." As if to demonstrate his point, Sam started pulling at said blanket, and only now Dean noticed that he had managed to wrap it around himself in an elaborate knot that would have made any sailor proud. With a few strong tugs, Sam pulled the blanket free, and Dean felt relieved and a little embarrassed at the thought that something as simple as a bunched up blanket could cause such a violent reaction in him.

Sam straightened the blanket, not looking up to meet Dean's eyes. "When you couldn't move, you…well, I guess you must have had a nightmare, forgot where you were…" Sam shrugged uncomfortably and finally looked up to meet his brother's eyes. "You were hyperventilating. It's no big deal."

Dean didn't share that particular point of view. He couldn't remember the last time he had hyperventilated, wasn't even sure he _had_ ever hyperventilated before. Certainly not from a panic attack. He faced down ghosts and demons on a regular basis, but a bad dream gave him trouble breathing? He couldn't believe it. Didn't want to believe it.

At least Sam didn't take that as his cue to try and initiate a round of emotional sharing between brothers like he did far too often as far as Dean was concerned. Dean appreciated that Sam kept his distance, but that didn't mean that those thoughts weren't running through his little brother's head. Better safe than sorry, so Dean quickly reached out and picked up the discarded paper bag that Sam had thrown on the bed earlier. It was a bag from a local fast food joint, the one where they had gotten their last takeout meal before this whole nightmare had begun.

"I'm glad I didn't imagine smelling fries, at least."

A small smile stole across Sam's face. "Count yourself lucky I still found it lying around. It was either that or smothering you with a pillow."

Dean crumpled the bag up and tossed it off the bed. "Well, I'm glad you didn't go for door B then. How long was I out?"

"Uhm…" Sam quickly checked his watch. "About six hours since I brought you back here, a bit less maybe. I woke you up twice for concussion checks, and you seemed pretty coherent both times."

Dean frowned. "I don't remember that."

Sam shrugged. "Well, you answered all the questions I asked you. And you were grumpy, which I took as a good sign since it's your normal state when you get knocked over the head. Your normal state most of the time when you don't get knocked over the head, too."

"Ha, ha."

Sam shook his head and scooted a little closer. Not too close, and Dean was glad that he was keeping a little distance. If there was one thing Dean needed right now, it was a little space.

"What do you remember?"

And despite the physical distance, the emphatic undertone was right there in Sam's voice. Sam wanted to know what he remembered, and next thing he knew Sam was going to ask him how he was feeling. It was only going to go downhill from there.

"Dean?"

But he also wasn't going to let up anytime soon, so Dean decided to give Sam what he wanted to hear. At least for now, while his questions remained as easy to answer as this one. He shrugged.

"I did some research while you were gone, figured there was a chance that we're dealing with a zombie or something similar. It was the one thing we didn't consider before, the living dead, and I figured while you were at the library I could check and see if that idea went somewhere. So I went to check out the cemetery. There was this one half-dug grave, and I went to take a look at it."

Dean ran a hand through his hair and winced as his hand brushed against a sizeable lump on the right side of his head.

"I must have let my guard down. It was a rookie mistake. I mean, if there's a half-dug grave, it's a sure bet that someone's around who didn't finish the digging yet, right? But I didn't pay enough attention. He hit me over the head with something and everything turned dark. Next thing I know, I woke up in a frigging casket. I couldn't get myself out, and that's about all I remember. It's a bit fuzzy after that, but I guess you dug me up before I ran out of air."

"Barely." Sam sighed and tiredly rubbed his eyes with one hand. When he looked up, Dean noticed for the first time that Sam's eyes were bloodshot, and that his brother looked beyond tired.

"What do you mean?"

Sam gave a humorless laugh. "Dean, you weren't breathing when I dragged you out of that grave."

That of course was a new piece of information. And one that bore a whole lot of possible implications, none of which Dean wanted to contemplate in depth.

"Dude, please tell me you didn't do any CPR on me."

Sam's head snapped up and his eyes widened almost comically at Dean's question.

"What? I tell you that you stopped breathing and _that's_ what you're worried about?"

Dean shrugged. "Yeah. No offence man, but if it isn't one of those Baywatch chicks, I don't want anyone breathing in my mouth."

Sam stared at his brother for a moment, then he shook his head. "If it helps your peace of mind, you were stubborn enough to start breathing again on your own. But for the record, if it had taken CPR, I would have done it without thinking twice about it."

Dean shrugged and looked away uncomfortably, desperate to change the topic. "Yeah well. How did you find me, anyway?"

Sam shrugged. "I pieced together your research on the computer when I got home. I couldn't reach you on the phone, and then I met our friend the grave digger. He didn't want to tell me why your phone was ringing in the back of his van, but once I saw the body in it, it wasn't that hard to find out what he had done with you. So I started digging." He shrugged again. "You know the rest."

That wasn't entirely true. Sam had left out one important detail in his tale, and that was an answer Dean very much wanted to know.

"What happened to the guy? The grave digger?"

Something flashed across Sam's face at the question, and for a moment Dean was worried what his brother's answer was going to be.

Dean knew what he would have done. If it had been Sam who had vanished, Dean would have stopped at nothing to find out where his brother was. But Sam was different. Of course Sam would have done everything to find Dean, too. Dean had no doubt about that. But if he had had to resort to dramatic means to find him, it was going to weigh heavily on Sam. Dean didn't want to be the reason for that kind of weight on his brother's conscience.

"Sam?"

Sam shrugged awkwardly, running a hand over his face. "Police custody. When he didn't want to tell me where you were, I knocked him out and tied him up in the back of his van. I called the police once we were back here."

"An anonymous tip?"

Sam nodded. "Yeah. They searched his house, and from what they found there he's going to stay in custody for a while longer."

Sam nodded towards the other side of the room, and for the first time Dean noticed their police scanner standing on the small table beside the door. That of course explained how Sam could have known what had happened after he had placed his anonymous tip.

"What did they find?"

"Bodies, in his basement. Today definitely wasn't the first time he dug up a body on the cemetery. The police have no clue about what's going on, I'd say once you're up on your feet again we go over there and take a look at it ourselves. We need to figure out what exactly he did with those bodies, and why those other people ended up dead. But for now it should be over."

Dean sighed and leaned back more comfortably back against the headboard. "The job is done, that's the most important thing."

"No, it isn't."

Sam had spoken softly, but in the silence of the room the words rang loudly in Dean's ears. "What?"

"It's not the most important thing that the damn job is done!" Sam looked up, and suddenly his eyes were no longer tired and dejected, but instead were glaring angrily. "I don't care about the job, Dean. You nearly died today, are you even aware of that? If I had stayed in the library for just a bit longer, if I hadn't looked at the computer to see what you had been researching, if I hadn't called you and heard your phone ring in that van, damn it if I had been a little slower in digging up that grave, then you'd be dead now! So sorry, but compared to that I don't give a damn about the job!"

Dean was stunned for a second at that unexpected outbreak. "It's a dangerous job, Sam. But you knew that before."

"Yes, and that's exactly the point!" Sam threw his hands in the air, but a second later seemed to slump in on himself. Dean's attention perked up at the sudden shift in his brother's mood. Angry Sam he could deal with. But angry Sam had roared once and had then retreated back into whatever corner of his mind his brother normally kept him locked up in. No, what Dean was facing right now was his brother in emotional upheaval, and that was something he had never been good at dealing with.

"Sammy…"

"Don't _Sammy_ me!" Apparently, angry Sam had broken free for a final appearance before it made way for dejected Sam again. With a shake of his head, Sam slumped in on himself as far as that was possible with a body as tall as his. But Dean was probably the only person on earth who had no problem seeing the sad and confused six year old that was perpetually hiding in his brother, no matter how old he got. But back when his brother had still been six years old, at least Dean had known how to make things better for his brother. Right now, he didn't even know what Sam's problem was.

"It's not the first time something like this has happened, Dean. By far not the first time. Every time we go on a hunt, something like this can happen."

"Yes. And it's always been like this Sam. As I said, it's not really a new development."

Sam shook his head with a tired sigh.

"I know. It's just…Dean, I dug you out of a grave. And all the while I was digging, I was asking myself if I was too late. I didn't know if you were alive, if you were dying right now, if that guy had killed you before he had buried you. And I can't do that anymore. How can we go on all these hunts, not knowing when our luck is finally going to run out?"

Dean raised his eyebrows, even though Sam didn't look at him to see it, and shuffled uncomfortable on the mattress. Of all the things he had been prepared for, an existential crisis was not one of them.

"I don't know Sam. We just keep doing what we're doing. It's a crappy job, but somebody has to do it."

Sam laughed mirthlessly and shook his head.

"And that somebody has to be us?"

Dean shrugged. "Don't know if it has to be us. But right now it is us."

"But that's just it, Dean. Just because it has always been that way, doesn't mean it has to stay that way. I mean, why do we have to take these risks?"

"Sam, what's going on with you? We do this job because if we don't, people get hurt. Or worse. And yeah, it's a crappy job, the payment sucks and it's dangerous, but it's what we do. What about all the people we save? Without us, they'd get hurt or die and wouldn't even know from what."

Sam nodded now, even though the expression in his eyes was anything but agreeing.

"Yeah. But…damn it Dean, it's all so screwed up. Ever since Dad…" He shook his head again and stared down at his nervously twisting hands. "Dad is dead. And I know you don't want to talk about it, but I can't just pretend that it didn't happen, all right? Dad is dead, and we're still doing this screwed up job, and I just can't…" He shook his head and ran a hand over his face. "I can't lose you, too, all right? I just can't. And yesterday I nearly did. I can't deal with that."

Dean pushed himself up even further on the bed. He was still feeling tired, and his head was slowly starting to hurt again. The last thing he needed right now was for his brother to have a breakdown. He couldn't deal with that.

"Listen Sam, what do you want me to say? Yes, every time we go on a hunt, one of us can die. _One_ of us. Because while it was me in that casket last night, you're not the only one who's worried about losing somebody else, okay? But that doesn't mean we have to quit the job, Sam. All those things don't go away just because we turn our backs on them."

Sam shook his head again and finally turned to look at his brother form red-rimmed eyes. "So that's it? It sucks, but we just have to take that risk?"

Dean leaned forward, ignoring the pain from his abused muscles. He hadn't even dug that grave. All he had done was lie in the casket, but for some reason his body felt as if he had done all the previous night's work. But the pain wasn't bad enough to stop him from moving, and right now that was all that mattered. He leaned forward, arms leaning loosely on his legs.

"What do you want me to say, Sam? Do you want us to quit hunting, settle down somewhere and get a regular day-job? It wouldn't change anything."

"No? A normal life, a _safe_ life wouldn't change anything? No longer chasing after things and people that want to kill us wouldn't change anything?"

Dean shrugged. "It would change things, sure. But it wouldn't be the guarantee you're looking for. There is no guarantee that we both stay alive, even if we quite the job right here and now. You have to understand that, Sam. There is no guarantee. Not in this job, not in normal life. And yeah, this was a close call. I get that. But you got me out in time. That's what counts."

Sam kept shaking his head. "And what if I'm not in time the next time something like this happens?"

Dean sighed. This was exactly the kind of conversation he had wanted to avoid, but of course Sam had managed to steer them right towards an emo-moment of monumental proportions. That's what the captain of the Titanic must have felt the moment he realized they were going straight for the iceberg and no amount of steering was going to stop them from colliding. So all he could do was face this head on.

"Remember what I told you when I came to get you at Stanford?"

Sam frowned, surprised, and for a moment that haunted look vanished from his face. "What?"

"When I came to get you at Stanford, I told you that I couldn't do this alone."

"No, you said you didn't _want_ to do this alone, Dean."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Semantics. Anyway, my point is that that's the thing. This job, it can get you killed pretty damn quick if you don't watch out. Hunting alone, you don't get very old. Or you become like Gordon, or those loners at the Roadhouse. What we do is dangerous, but it's what Dad trained us to do. What he prepared us for. We're better equipped to handle all this crap than most others are, and we got one thing that they don't."

Sam rolled his eyes as if he already knew what Dean was going for, but he shook his head.

"What?"

"Us. And don't roll your eyes on me Sam, you're the one who started this whole sharing and caring, so now you're going to listen. The reason why we can do this is that we're not stuck doing this alone. We got each other's backs. You dug me out of that grave, which, if I haven't said before, is something I'm pretty grateful for by the way. Doesn't matter if it was a close call or not, all that matters is that you did find me. Just like I would have found you if it had been the other way around. In this crap choice of a job, knowing that you've got my back is all the guarantee I need."

Sam just looked at Dean for a moment, then he shook his head.

"Do I need to go get the holy water?"

"Ha, ha. You're a riot, Sam."

"I'm sorry, but if you start making emotional confessions all of a sudden, I think I have a right to suspect demonic possession. Not to mention that you are concussed."

"Speaking of which. My head feels like a marching band is practicing, we got a wannabe zombie tamer to deal with tomorrow, and seeing that it's still the middle of the frigging night, I'd say we try to catch some more shuteye."

Sam nodded. "All right. You want a Tylenol for your head?"

Dean shook his head as he slowly moved back into a lying position, taking care not to entangle himself in the blankets again. One embarrassment per night was enough.

"Nah, I'm good. Now stop fussing and get some sleep."

Sam got up from Dean's bed, kicked off his shoes and pulled back the covers of his own bed.

"All right. I'll wake you in two hours."

"Dude, I've been up, coherent and talking for nearly half an hour now. I think you can stop worrying about my head. Besides, you had your shot at playing Twenty Questions. Lord knows what answers you tricked out of me in my weak and vulnerable state."

Sam stretched out on the bed and turned off the light on the table between the two beds. However, he made no move to get up and turn off the small table light on the other side of the room, and Dean couldn't help but think that it was a deliberate oversight on Sam's part, so that the room wouldn't turn entirely dark. In the dim light, Dean could see the tired smile playing around his brother's mouth.

"You know the drill Dean. Just the usual questions to check your coherency. Name, age, state, that kind of stuff."

"If you say so."

"Good night, Dean."

"Night Sammy."

Dean pulled the covers up to his chin and shifted into a more comfortable position on the bed. He had just closed his eyes when Sam spoke again.

"But seriously Dean, Susan Peters? In ninth grade? How did that happen?"

He should have known. "Isn't there a rule about not asking a concussed person for private information?"

Dean had his eyes closed, but he knew Sam's smile had just widened. "I asked, you answered. Fair game."

"Bitch."

"Jerk. And now get some sleep."

Dean felt a smile of his own creep on his face. Sleep sounded good. After all, Sam had his back.

**THE END**

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Thanks for reading. As always, please let me know what you think. Thanks a lot!


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